A Movement, Not a Moment

Riché Richardson, who was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama, is an Associate Professor of African American Literature in the Africana Studies & Research Center at Cornell University. Her other areas of interest include American literature, American studies, Black feminism, gender studies, and Southern studies. She was the 2019-2020 Olive B. O’Connor Visiting Distinguished Chair in English at Colgate University. Dr. Richardson received her B.A. in English from Spelman College in 1993 and her Ph.D. in American Literature from the English Department at Duke University in 1998. In 2001, she received a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Richardson spent the first ten years of her academic career in the University of California system at UC Davis and received a Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship (2002) as well as an award from the university for Diversity and the Principles of Community (2008). She has produced nearly 40 essays published in journals such as American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, TransAtlantica, Southern Quarterly, Black Camera, NKA, Phillis, Technoculture, and Labrys. Dr. Richardson is a 2017 Public Voices Fellow with the Op-Ed Project, whose pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Public Books, and HuffPost. “Black Masculinity and the U.S. South: From Uncle Tom to Gangsta” was highlighted by Choice Books among the Outstanding Academic Titles of 2008, and her most recent book is “Emancipation’s Daughters: Re-Imagining the National Body and Black Femininity,” published by Duke University Press. Dr. Richardson is editor of the “New Southern Studies” book series at the University of Georgia Press and is also a visual artist.

Tony Byers is a diversity and inclusion expert who focuses on “the right thing to do” to the business imperative of building a D&I organizational culture to the next level. Author of the book, The Multiplier Effect of Inclusion: How Diversity and Inclusion Advances Innovation and Drives Growth, Dr. Byers is best known for leading and revitalizing D&I efforts with some of the most respected and successful companies.

Verónica Martínez-Matsuda is an Associate Professor at Cornell University’s ILR School, where she teaches courses on Immigration, Latinx Studies, and American Labor and Working-Class History. She received her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Martínez-Matsuda’s dissertation, “Making the Modern Migrant,” was awarded the Barnes F. Lathrop Prize for Best Dissertation in the Department of History. It was also awarded runner-up for the Best Dissertation Prize by Labor History (Routledge). Her article, “For Labor and Democracy: Competing Visions of Migrant Farmwork, Social Reform, and American Civil Rights in the 1940s,” appeared in The Journal of American History (Sept. 2019) and was awarded the 2020 Organization of American Historians’ Binkley-Stephenson Award for the best article in the JAH during the preceding calendar year. Professor Martínez-Matsuda is the author of Migrant Citizenship: Race, Rights, and Reform in the U.S. Farm Labor Camp Program (University of Pennsylvania Press, “Politics and Culture in Modern America” book series, 2020). Her research has received funding from the Ford Foundation, The Smithsonian, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, among other institutions.